Medina worked, ran for office in Mexico

Mayoral candidate Manuel Medina speaks during MOVE San Antonio's Millenial Civic Happy Hour at Dorcol in San Antonio, Texas on January 12, 2017. Ray Whitehouse / for the San Antonio Express-News

Mayoral candidate Manuel Medina speaks during MOVE San Antonio's Millenial Civic Happy Hour at Dorcol in San Antonio, Texas on January 12, 2017. Ray Whitehouse / for the San Antonio Express-News

Photo: Ray Whitehouse, Photographer / For The San Antonio Express-News

Photo: Ray Whitehouse, Photographer / For The San Antonio Express-News

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Mayoral candidate Manuel Medina speaks during MOVE San Antonio's Millenial Civic Happy Hour at Dorcol in San Antonio, Texas on January 12, 2017. Ray Whitehouse / for the San Antonio Express-News

Mayoral candidate Manuel Medina speaks during MOVE San Antonio's Millenial Civic Happy Hour at Dorcol in San Antonio, Texas on January 12, 2017. Ray Whitehouse / for the San Antonio Express-News

Photo: Ray Whitehouse, Photographer / For The San Antonio Express-News

Medina worked, ran for office in Mexico

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Applying this year for a place on the May ballot, mayoral contender Manuel Medina declared that he has lived continuously in Texas for more than 24 years and in San Antonio for more than 20.

The 47-year-old native of Mexico has stuck to this story on the campaign trail, portraying himself as a patriotic American who immigrated to the United States at age 3 and has lived in this country ever since.

Public records and media accounts from Mexico suggest an alternative timeline.

According to the records, Medina worked at a university in Torreón, in the northern Mexico state of Coahuila, from 1997 to 2008; ran for public office in Torreón in 2005; and divorced and remarried in Torreón in 2006.

Born in Torreón, Medina has made his immigration to America the centerpiece of his biography.

“I was born on the South Side — maybe a little further south than most of you, in a little place called Mexico,” he told an audience at a mayoral debate this month. “Now, at the age of 3, my mom and I crossed the border, maybe swam a little, into McAllen, then came here to San Antonio.

“We moved to El Paso and then to Los Angeles,” Medina continued. “I grew up as a DREAM Act student, but I also grew up as an American, pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and singing the Star Spangled Banner.”

Medina began attending the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. After a four-year gap in attendance that began in 1996, he graduated with a degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2000, according to academic records.

“Then I returned to San Antonio, and I got to work,” he told the audience.

When I asked Medina on Wednesday about his activities in Torreón around this period, he became defensive.

“This extensive bio that you’re writing about me in your one-page opinion column,” he said, “where are the holes?”

Here are the holes:

According to a Mexican social security statement, Medina worked at Universidad Autonoma de Coahuila in Torreón from 1997 to 2008, earning about 225 pesos a day.

And according to a Mexican divorce decree and a Mexican marriage license, Medina divorced his first wife in Torreón on Dec. 7, 2006, then remarried in Torreón nine days later, on Dec. 16, 2006.

On Wednesday, Medina insisted he hasn’t lived in Mexico since he was a child.

“I’ve always lived since I was 3 in the United States of America,” he told me. “At times in McAllen, at times in San Antonio, at times in El Paso and Los Angeles.

“I’ve never owned or rented an apartment in Mexico,” Medina added. “I met my wife in Torreón. Certainly I have spent time in Mexico, but either way you look at it, I’m an American and have lived in America my whole life.”

Medina said he continued to live in Texas while working sporadically for the university in Torreón as a “visiting professor, administrative aide and study abroad proponent.”

He said he ran for office in Torreón merely to get more clients for his political consulting firm.

“It was just a way to open the door to get more clients,” Medina said. “The goal was to expand my political consulting business into Mexico, and this was one way.”

Medina added that he “was going back and forth” between Texas and Mexico during this period, occasionally staying at his father’s home in Torreón. But he insisted he was living in San Antonio in an apartment on Huebner Oaks.

He became an American citizen in September 2009.

Whether Medina lived in Mexico as an adult is not a campaign issue in itself. The question with bearing on the race is whether Medina is being honest with voters about his continuous residence here.

On Wednesday, Councilman Ron Nirenberg said it appears that Medina has something to hide.

“This certainly betrays the myth that Manuel Medina has created about himself,” said Nirenberg, who is running alongside Medina to replace Mayor Ivy Taylor, “and tells voters he can’t be trusted on his biography let alone his wild promises.”